On Monday, July 12, Right to Play partnered with Holy Land Trust’s nonviolence department and began brainstorming and developing a focus group for conflict resolution and peace building. The group encompassed a variety of different people like educators, parents, students, and educational advisors. The focus group aims to build new strategies for conflict resolution and building peace inside the schools and the surrounding communities.

The group met in the afternoon with mostly mothers and teachers in attendance. The women were not shy about openly voicing their opinions which gave a very strong and empowering dynamic to the group.  The meeting started off with an ice-breaker game where they passed around a bag saying their names and occupations. After a few minutes of smiles and laughter, everyone got down to business and started discussing difficult issues facing Palestinian children. The main issue that continued to come up was that children were under a strict learning regiment that lacked an active and engaging curriculum. Teachers are told to get through a specific amount of material in a year and students are expected to embrace the dullness of that material. The educational institutions in Palestine need to be revised. Everyone in the group had an idea about how revisions could be made which lead to an excellent discussion, and was one of the main purposes of the meeting.

Right to play and Holy Land Trust are working along with these mothers and teachers to integrate some active skills of building peace and conflict release through lots of new creative ideas.  Hoping to these ideas will be applied into the current institutions curriculum and classrooms developing a livelier program. Everyone in the meeting learned something from each other and the hope for the coming school year is that when the training begins everyone will continue to.